Google’s Project Ara isn’t the only hope for phones with replaceable and upgradeable parts. Finland’s Circular Devices is developing an alternative concept called the Puzzlephone, which breaks the handset down into three constituent elements. The phone’s Spine provides the LCD, speakers and basic structure, its Heart contains the battery and secondary electronics, and its Brain has the processor and camera modules.”
The concept of a modular smartphone seems to be attracting more attention. Interesting.
I’m interested in this, not only for the upgradability of the thing, but the possibility of choosing what kind of cpu and how much ram/storage I can put in. I’m tired of living in a world where customization pretty much means ‘What color would you like it in?’
For me, the Project Ara approach is more appealing.
For some ordinary users, who want to focus the strengths of the phone to their needs, this might be enough. But I suspect it won’t be configurable enough to make it worthwhile, with only three subsystems (e.g. you can’t upgrade the camera without upgrading the CPU).
Hopefully Project Ara (or something similar) becomes popular enough that it gets critical mass in the marketplace.
I fail to see the point of this.
You can only choose between a handful of options, which will all come from the same source since they have to be supported by the OS anyway.
You end up with a device which is heavier, clunky and costs more, with *very* limited upgradability.
Is it worth it ? Definitely not.
Will it fail ? Certainly.
There are these magical things people invent to allow components from different sources to interoperate.
I believe they’re called standards or something.
I don’t think Google kept project Aria because they actually think that it will become a mass selling device. I do think that project Aria will be really valuable in figuring out the most efficient way to build smartphones. So the Nexus N+1 is the Nexus N with a different camera and cpu. Everything else is exactly the same. All left over parts other than the cpu+camera can be reused. No new drivers needed for anything else.
That’s how everything already works today !
New products aren’t just built from scratch, most components are reused from the previous generation, or slightly improved.
They just don’t encase each component in a separate “lego” package, with lousy electrical contacts, assembly problems and all.
I remember some 10 years ago seeing an article about Dov Moran’s “next big thing” – after he brought USB thumb drives into existence he wanted to make a modular cellphone called Modu. This phone was divided into units, where each unit fulfilled a particular function (CPU, camera, storage etc.) and you could attach or remove those unit blocks as you’d like. The project flopped.